50 Times People Spotted Something Very Creepy And Had To Share It Online

When asked what is it about certain creepy stories that affect us so profoundly, S. Elizabeth said that “I can point to a lot of elements, but they all boil down to one core piece of the puzzle: that something fundamentally feels very wrong. The stories in which things happen when they shouldn’t, people are somehow where they couldn’t possibly be.”

She gave us some examples: “The television that powers on suddenly, even though it’s unplugged. The face you see just outside your window even though you’re on the third floor. The emails you begin receiving from a friend who died half a year ago. The sibling who goes away on vacation and comes back changed, not themselves. It’s their face, but it’s somehow not them anymore.”

S. Elizabeth said that “this sense of wrongness is made that much troubling and lonely and desperate when you realize you seem to be the only one who notices these uncanny goings-on.” According to her, if a creepy story has any of these elements, it’s bound to have an impact on us and give us a sleepless night or two.

This new research conducted by David Zald shows that people differ in their chemical response to thrilling situations. Dopamine, one of the main hormones released during scary and thrilling activities, depends on each individual. To put it simply, some get more of a kick out of the same amount of dopamine. According to Zald, some brains lack something that he calls “brakes” on the dopamine release and reuptake in the brain. As a result, they will be enjoying more thrilling, scary, and risky situations than the rest.

According to Dr. Margee Kerr, a staff sociologist at ScareHouse, a haunted house in Pittsburgh that takes all year to plan, for anyone to really enjoy scary situations, they must know it’s a safe environment. “It’s all about triggering the amazing fight-or-flight response to experience the flood of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine, but in a completely safe space. Haunted houses are great at this—they deliver a startle scare by triggering one of our senses with different sounds, air blasts, and even smells,” she told The Atlantic.

Moreover, according to Dr. Kerr, “these senses are directly tied to our fear response and activate the physical reaction, but our brain has time to process the fact that these are not “real” threats. Our brain is lightning-fast at processing threat. I’ve seen the process thousands of times from behind the walls in ScareHouse—someone screams and jumps and then immediately starts laughing and smiling. It’s amazing to observe."

Interestingly, Dr.Kerr believes that fear is also something that’s culturally and socially constructed. She suggests that “when we look across time and across the world, we find that people truly can become afraid of anything.” An exemplary case of this phenomenon is Baby Albert.

“The poor child was made deathly afraid of white rabbits in the 1920s before researchers were required to be ethical. So we know that we can learn to fear, and this means our socialization and the society in which we are raised is going to have a lot to do with what we find scary,” Dr. Kerr told The Atlantic.

Other creepy things that many cultures find scary are creatures of different kinds, like semi-human creatures, creatures from an outer world, supernatural monsters, and things that defy the laws of nature in some way.